Extremely Large Optical Telescope (ELOT) 2003. In 2003 Skycorp was awarded a DARPA “seedling” contract to develop the concept of a 50 meter in diameter optical diffraction limited telescope. This telescope would be constructed on orbit using expendable vehicles. These vehicles would be especially outfitted to be joined together to make a work environment for the construction of the large telescope. Project feasibility was established during the study and DARPA elevated the effort to a full program, handing it off to the larger aerospace companies. The image below is the size of the telescope alongside the Shuttle.

NASA Langley 2005

Skycorp Incorporated was awarded a contract by NASA Langley in 2005 to work with the Structures and Mechanics branch at LaRC to lead the technical development of a 500 kilowatt modular Solar Electric Transportation Vehicle (SETV). The project name was “Modular Advanced Large Space Platform (MALSP) under the NASA Human and Robotics Technology (H&RT) program. Skycorp led the systems engineering definition team where we came up with the system design and level 1 requirements defintion, propulsion design, mission analysis and planning. Skycorp also was awarded a subcontract from Andrews Space for the SETV as part of their Concept Exploration and Refinement (CE&R) contract for the NASA Vision for Exploration (VSE) systems architecture.

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NASA Langley 2006

Skycorp was awarded a contract with NASA Langley to provide a report on Lunar surface systems with commercial enhancements to the NASA Exploration Systems Architecture Study (ESAS) report. Our deliverable to NASA was a 114 page report that detailed the history of lunar surface systems from the 1957 Horizon report to the latest thinking from the NASA H&RT and CE&R studies of 2005-06.

NASA Langley at the time was developing a jib crane, shown in the images to the right, that would be used to unload cargo from the NASA LSAM (Altair) lander. Cargo handling was an afterthought during the Apollo era but had been extensively researched by the excellent Eagle Engineering company. There was a lot of good work by Boeing (studies led by Gordon Woodcock), SAIC, and an extensive portfolio put together by the American Society of Civil Engineers. We summarized almost all of this work, developed a set of requirements for the Langley LETO crane and provided high quality graphics for the Langley engineers.

Lunar surface systems is an evolving specialty at Skycorp and though it is a vision for the future, we are working hard to bring that future into the present. Look for more on this on our Lunar page here. This work gained us a follow on contract for graphics for Langley in 2007. A couple of links to the NASA Langley work follow:

NASA MSFC Solar Array Design for Small Solar Electric Tug.

In 2007 Skycorp was awarded a small contract by the NASA Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) to design a solar array for a small Solar Electric Tug (SEP). This SEP design would carry a small lunar lander from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to lunar orbit, taking advantage of the higher mass ratio of a Xenon ion propulsion system and the less expensive launch of a SpaceX Falcon 1.

NASA Glenn Wireless Controller for a Xenon Hall Thruster PPU

In 2007 Skycorp was awarded a design contract to develop improvements in the digital controller section of NASA Glenn’s extensive portfolio of solar electric propulsion system power processing units (PPU). Integrated the Sun Microsystems Sunspot controller into the NASA Glenn design.